Keela Case Study

Case Study

“As a startup, when you’re taking the time to change the world, your suppliers have to be super ‘on it.’ Filestack is on it.”

Keela.co is a platform that simplifies nonprofit management. Keela’s suite of tools packs a big punch, helping nonprofits track donations in one CRM, issue donation receipts that are IRS and CRA compliant, send out newsletter campaigns, and more -- all in one, beautiful and easy to use space. Keela provides an affordable end-to-end platform to enable nonprofits to do all this, freeing them up to change the world. We sat down with Cofounder and CEO Nejeed Kassam to discuss Keela’s technology stack.

Like the nonprofits they empower, Keela’s team is determined to do more with less. They rely on third party services and integrations like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Stripe, PayPal and Filestack to manage their emails, payments, and file processing. As Kassam explains, “we build the strategy in the huddle and bring in the best players to run the play.”

Kassam estimates that this practice saves Keela hundreds of thousands of dollars, while also enabling a superior product. They are able to use the best features, while freeing up developer time to focus on their core product. Filestack saved Keela an estimated $25,000 CAD during implementation alone, not including the costs of upkeep. The alternative would have been to use in-house developers, which would have taken at least three months for the initial implementation. As Kassam says, “it would have been a stupid amount of work to build it from scratch.”

“Filestack has already saved us an estimated $25,000 CAD and 3 months of development time.”

Although Keela considered other alternatives before development, they found no one else who could do what Filestack does. Specifically, Keela needed a way to immediately import personal information and donation amount as soon as a donor submits a donation online. But that’s where it gets complicated, because Keela needed to find a way to display receipts as a PDF on the screen, email the receipt to the donor, and store it securely in a CRM for the nonprofit to access -- all in real time. Everything they came across only did part of the job, but they needed something to handle the process seamlessly. Enter Filestack, and their problem was solved. Keela’s development team worked with Filestack’s front-end packages to integrate with their back-end of Meteor and MongoDB to make it happen. Then, they were off to the races -- with a ton of content to work with. Keela uploads hundreds of files a month, which their users otherwise would have to type out by hand.

“Building and rebuilding for different servers and locations would have been impractical, time consuming, expensive, and a worse alternative. It was a no-brainer.”

Keela also uses Filestack’s direct integrations with both Amazon Web Services and Azure Cloud Storage. They started using Azure before AWS had servers in Canada. When AWS launched servers in Canada, Filestack had access to them within the first week. This allowed Keela, a Vancouver-based company, to launch a new product-line for Canadian nonprofits on local servers, which previously was not possible due to Canadian privacy laws. This would not have been possible without Filestack.

As an API-first company, Filestack is defined by the companies and services who use us to build awesome products. We are proud to enable Keela and the nonprofits they serve to leave a lasting impact on the world.